I have the same issue. The All Photographs collection under Catalog shows the message "Click the Import... button to begin", although the numerical value of total images is there. I tried re-optimizing, and restarting, but this did not work for me. When I first upgraded, some of my other top level folders (2011, 2012, etc) showed a message "no photos in selected folder", but this seems to have resolved itself.

I too am having this same issue. I tried what selps03 recommended and still nothing.

Also, the main foilder that holds the physical files does not display what is in the sub folders. If I go to each individual folder, it will show the data. The "All Photographs" selection in the catalog shows the 29,000 number, which is correct, but does not show me the previews.

The other odd thing is that if I type in a keyword in the text filter box, I get image previews to display.

Well, I had the problem fixed, but now it's back. It won't show me the previews for the images in the "All Photographs" section. If I go down and click on the actual folders, it will show the images. Anyone have any idea what's going on?

I'm trying the import from previous catalog approach, after 8 hours now, I'm at 15k of 45k photos....It would be really nice to know what the issue is and whether there is a workaround that does not take hours to complete. I have a very recent computer, i2700k, 16gb ram, plenty of disk space, nothing else running. My photos are on multiple drives

I cancelled the reimport, deleted the catalogs. Went back to open a new catalog from the old catalog. The conversion takes place. New catalog is slightly larger. I tried re optimizing, but still left with "Click the import... button to begin". So, I'm back at no usable catalog. Please update with what you hear from Adobe. I may have to call as well.

Update, I spent two hours on Chat with Adobe, let them take over driving, still same issue. Final step before escalating to next level is they started the import from the old catalog again, so I'm back to waiting for that to finish.

I was on the phone from 8am (5am pacific) when Adobe opened until 12:15 and wanted to update this post with what I found out.

I have a case number and it is now escalated to an engineer as we have tried everything to resolve the issue. I did notice that when openeing a smaller catalog the issue does not seem to surface. My main catalog is over 86,000 images and NONE of the images show up in the library module when viewing All Photographs. It seems as the size of my catalog is where the engineers will be talking a look at. The 86,000 images worked perfectly fine in LR3.

Does any one else have a large catalog? If anyone else has this problem can you post the size of your catalog.

Same problem here but I'm only at 45k images. Adobe wanted me to import, but the import from catalog was taking way too long. I am currently exporting my current catalog in smaller chunks. I'm trying one at 5k and the second at 40k. Once the export finishes, I will try and import from catalog on both of these.

It isn't just a parent/children issue, I can multi-select any combination of folders and when the total number of images in the multi-selection exceeds roughly 1100 the "no photos in selected folder" problem occurs. If I de-select any folder to reduce the total number of images in the multi-selection, the message goes away and the images reappear in the browser.

I too had problem this morning with 73,000 photos. I use the 'All Photos" selection all the time especially when filtering. Reading these posts I started from scratch with a new catalog and an import from my last LR3 catalog. Yes, it took 6 hours, and YES IT IS FIXED. So, just do it. I was working on my PC doing spreadsheets, internet, e-mail etc the whole while, suffering through the mollases. But, everything is so sluggish, I think I'll still be running LR3 until the first LR4 update. Very dissapointing that the prerease testing did not elucidate fixes for these issues. But we need to betatest so that the CS6 release fares better!

Web-Weaver, checking "Show photos in subfolders" does not solve the issue.

Birder Frank, glad it worked for you. I left my running all last night and only made it through 15k images. I canceled it this morning and called Adobe. They started me doing in import from catalog again, but I canceled that as well. I am currently exporting my current catalog in smaller chunks to see if that will resolve the issue. First export 5800 images ran just fine. Exporting the rest 39k went to 80% complete and then crashed LR3. I'm now splitting up the remaining 39k into < 10k chunks, exporting those. I'll reply again once I get exported.

I'm running 3.3ghz i7 2700k, 16gb of ram. 8900 images on internal HDD, ~37k images on external drive. By attempting to export first, I'm hoping to bypass the preview issue as it should use the previews that are there already, there is no option to render previews on import from catalog that I am aware of. My export of the 8900 images just went to 85% and crashed lightroom. I have shut down machine, rebooted, optimized the catalog and attempting export again.

Edit: So, I had to reduce my export to ~5100 images to get it to complete. When it finished, it presented an error window indicating it could not find/did not have previews for all the images. Seems kind of odd to me as I can see them all. I'm exporting another image file of ~3k images next. Then I will try and import them.

It's gonna be real ugly if I have to regenerate 45k previews again.

Edit again: Ok, this is not going to work. The Export Catalog actually copies everything from the current drive to the backup location, the catalog and the images etc. Upon import, the files are not imported from their locations, but rather the images just backed up in the export are what is imported.

I'm going to move all my images to one primary drive. Try regenerating all previews and see if I can import from the LR3 catalog again and get it to complete. What a nightmare this is.

Everything (including displaying all photos by selecting the root folder) is now working correctly for me. Here is what I did:

1) Told LR4 to create a new catalog

2) Opened the new catalog in LR4

3) File... Import from another catalog...

4) Pointed the import to a copy of my (non-converted) LR3 catalog

5) LR4 first converted the LR3 catalog to a temp LR4 catalog and then did the import

6) Total time to import 108,423 images (on a NAS box) was about 1.75 hours

7) At the end of the import process, LR4 threw an error message about an error importing the catalog. I dismissed the message and all appears to be fine. Everything works and all of my keywords etc are where they should be.

There is a possible solution if nothing else works. In the old LR3 catalog select all the photos and write the metadata to files. Then reimport in a new LR4 catalog. There is the issue that you lose the history of edits but the files are imported. As far as I experienced, sometimes the catalogs become slightly corrupted and start to behave very strange but only when certain conditions are met.

Since LR4 beta went public, I think that I made the most extensive import tests on huge folders and only had problems after going over 200000 files (1.5 TB of mixed photo and video files with metadata written to files or as sidecar). In one go, LR4 imports 200000 files from my dataset in about 4h30min without issues. If you go over 210000 files the performance decreases very fast. For 225000 files it takes at least 10h if LR manages not to crash. And it never arrived at 230000 in one go.

IMPORTANT: Be aware that on large imports LR consumes lots of temporary disk space. For the 220000 files import, I need around 70GB free space. That space is freed after the import is complete and LR is restarted. If you don't have enough space LR may crash without warning about low space.

There is a possible solution if nothing else works. In the old LR3 catalog select all the photos and write the metadata to files. Then reimport in a new LR4 catalog. There is the issue that you lose the history of edits but the files are imported. As far as I experienced, sometimes the catalogs become slightly corrupted and start to behave very strange but only when certain conditions are met.

This really isn't a solution. The problem is NOT that the new LR4 catalog that was created by converting the LR3 doesn't have the right photos. It does have the right photos!

The problem is that there is a bug in the way LR4 displays the photos in certain instances. Creating a new catalog by importing (in addition to the huge number of disadvantages that re-importing has) does nothing to eliminate the bug, and of course the same bug could affect the new LR4 catalog you spent so much time importing photos into.

Jimmy, did you have any indication of progress for this step? I'm trying this step and the only progress I can see is the photo count jumped to 500, then made its way to 3500 and now it just seems stalled out. I don't want to cancel, but it does not appear to be doing anything at all. The other thing I see is that it is not creating previews/copying previews and updating them. It looks to me like it started and then stopped almost immediately.

I have a catalogue with 118000 and another one with 38000 and both work ok. I converted a third catalogue with just over 9000 and here the main directory and All Photographs display the correct count but no pictures

I have the same issue with about 120k pictures. I was able to create a new catalog and reimport the LR3 catalog but I lost all my publishing service setups and galleries which is unacceptable. How can Adobe not test this, this is not an isolated incident by the looks of things.

I did try to recreate the standard size previews and it appeared to work for a few folders but not others.

I also received the catalog conversion error at the end of the import but it didn't seem to impact anything.